Sally Field admits she couldn't be herself while dating Burt Reynolds: 'I was absent'

Sally Field is remembering what it was like to date Burt Reynolds.

The actress was recently a guest on ITV's This Morning, where she got candid about her complicated relationship with the late actor, who died last month at the age of 82 from a heart attack. The two struck up a five-year romance after meeting while filming Smokey and the Bandit in 1977.

"It was instantaneous and intense and I also said we were a perfect match of flaws," Field, 71, recalled. "We went together very well, but not necessarily for the right reasons. It was a pre-formed rut in my road. I say in [my] book [In Pieces] many times, 'If he had been different, would I have been different?'"

"He was who he was, a man of his time, and needed the women that he was with to represent him in a certain way," she continued. "I couldn't be myself, I was absent. I was behaving the way I was taught, that to be loved I had to disappear. So I had to disappear."

Field revealed last month in an interview with The View that her last conversation with Reynolds was actually about 30 years ago.

"He was a hugely important part of my life, but for a very short period of my life," Field explained. "I really didn't speak with him for, you know, the last 30 years of his life. And I would feel him kind of reach out to me via the press."

"It was something that he would do even when we were dating," she continued. "He would speak to me [through the press] about things that he could, like, call me on the phone about. He would, like, do the Today show and would say, 'Well, I need to tell Sally [this].'"

Hear more on their romantic past in the video below.

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